The Insider is Barrister and Mann's monthly newsletter. Each month we will feature our favorite Shave of the Day (SOTD), a profile of one of our awesome vendors, an overview of one of our special soap ingredients, and an especially cool, super funky perfume review written by the Barrister and Mann team. Each issue will also include an article written by a guest contributor! How cool is that?! 

We will also keep you informed about what is going on at Barrister and Mann; new products, sales, meetups, and any other cool stuff are all fair game. Feel free to send us your comments and suggestions. Thanks for reading!

In honor of the release of what we consider to be our greatest achievement, Barrister and Mann is going on the road! We'll be visiting four cities in September and one in October so that anyone who's interested can come to ask us questions about the aftershave, smell it, try it out, and just generally get a feel for our newest and proudest creation.

The Barrister's Reserve Whirlwind Tour makes its debut at the Seattle Shave Convention on Saturday, September 17 in Seattle, WA. We are SUPER DUPER excited because Seattle is one of our favorite cities and this will be a great place for us to start!

Our second stop will be at the 3rd Annual North East Shave Meet up at the Hard Rock Cafe in Foxwoods Casino in Mashantucket, CT. The event will be held from 11:00 am to 3:30 pm on Saturday, September 24, 2016. Come discuss the wonderful world of wet shaving, meet with other super cool wet shavers like yourself, and enjoy all that the casino has to offer!

Our third stop will be at famed barber Merchant & Rhoades in Chicago, IL on Thursday, September 29 at 7 pm. Come see us at this elegant men's grooming shop, formerly Truefitt & Hill, nestled in the heart of downtown Chicago.

Next up we'll be at the world-renowned Maggard Razors in Adrian, MI on Friday, September 30 from 5-8 pm. Come visit their huge, historic wet shaving shop and check out all that Adrian has to offer!

Our final stop will be luxury grooming specialist MenEssentials in Toronto, Canada on Saturday, October 1, 2016, where we will be attending the upcoming Toronto Wet Shavers' Meetup at The Fox & Fiddle Pub. Make sure to visit MenEssentials (either on the web or in person) for more info!

Our vendor of the month this month is legendary Californian retailer West Coast Shaving in Chino, California.

West Coast says:

"West Coast Shaving started in 2007 in search of a better way to shave. The founder stumbled across wet shaving and wanted to test the different types of DE razor blades. After he bought all the DE blades to test them out, he began to sell sample packs from his garage. 

The loyal members of the wet shaving community wanted more than just sample packs. West Coast Shaving started to added more products like safety razors, brushes, soaps, creams, etc. to meet the needs of our customers. As most wet shavers know, once you get introduced to wet shaving you typically never go back to cartridge razors and this become more of an addiction than a chore. 

Jumping ahead to 2016, we are now settled into our third move. We have a retail location in Chino, California and moved our shipping facility out of state to allow for faster shipping times. We strive to constantly provide excellent customer service and unparalleled selection at an affordable price point. We have a few projects that we hope to be releasing in the coming months, so keep an eye out.

Last but not least, we want to thank each and every one of our customers. Without our loyal customers, West Coast Shaving would not be the company we are today. Thank you again for all your support. Always remember to Keep Calm and Shave On."

Our Shave of the Month photo this month was taken by Garrett Hoover! Congratulations Garrett!

Garrett says about himself: 

My name Garrett, aka Garewolf. I'm 24 years old and, I never thought I'd say this, I love wet shaving.

I got into wetshaving after I discovered [reddit.com]/r/wicked_edge. Honestly, I thought it was a subreddit about swords haha.

I initially was putting a gift together for my father, but decided that it could be fun to try it out for myself! For that part, the rest is history as I had made my presence known(enough that I even earned myself a troll :b) but I've been loving this as a hobby. It's amazing how many great people I've met since last December.

For his contribution, Garrett will receive a jar of soap of his choice. And we received so many great submissions for our Oldie-But-Goodie contest that we'll be using one for next month's Insider as well! Stay tuned! 

I realize that I am reviewing another rather expensive fragrance this month, but hear me out. Rose is one of those scents that goes waaaaay back in men’s fragrance, but has largely died out over the course of the last thirty years or so. I suppose if anyone were going to bring it back properly, it would be either Chanel or Amouage. Curiously, it was actually both, but Amouage is the focus today.

Lyric Man is not an ordinary rose fragrance. In fact, when I’m asked to name the top three men’s roses on the market today, this one is usually on that list (occasionally something new will capture my attention for a bit, but Lyric usually supplants it after awhile anyway). It’s one of the purest, cleverest, most elegantly understated roses I’ve ever smelled, all silken bedsheets and kisses filled with promise. It’s the kind of rose you would expect to smell on a man accustomed to getting what he wants, with style and aplomb enough to know that he can pull of rose easily, but with taste enough to know better than to announce that fact at a volume above a whisper.

Lyric Man opens with an intense, dusky rose, rather what I imagine the smell of a rose otto distillery in Turkey might smell like. Unlike many other perfumes ostensibly built around the note, Lyric is unmistakably all about the rich, slightly powdery, tremendously sexy character of the real thing. I hesitate to call it a soliflor, but it’s quite obvious that the entire secondary structure of the perfume is built to exalt the quality of the rose note (which seems to be comprise of both synthetic and real rose, but is blended in a way that the House has simply upped the intensity of some of the flower’s more attractive characteristics). The light lime note in the background gives way to a rich, beautiful musk, not like the velvety-yet-soapy civet present in Amouage Gold, but rather more like the rich, beautiful musk of some woman you might happen to encounter in a dimly lit, very expensive restaurant renowned for sensual food and drinks that are even more so. I must confess that I miss the supposed inclusion of incense entirely, but I think the perfume is all the better for it; the woody, spicy intensity of incense notes can often be overwhelming and Lyric makes a point of keeping rose as the star of the show.

That said, a faint woody character does shine through to keep the flower from becoming overwhelming, sweet, or unnecessarily heavy. It’s the perfect compliment to the understated and elegant character of the perfume’s structure and, while I often think that Amouage’s fragrances are overdone and overhyped, I find Lyric Man to be extraordinarily impressive, cosmopolitan, and perfect for almost any weather or occasion in which one wishes to project an air of sensual confidence and poise. The fragrance is not cheap by any measure, but can be had for considerably less than its sticker price from both FragranceNet and FragranceX.

Isobutyl quinoline (sometimes spelled isobutyl quinolene and sometimes called Pyralone, which is a specific type of Iso Q) is a compound with history. This is the compound that was showcased in the creation of the famous perfume base Mousse de Saxe, the underpinning of the legendary leather character of Caron's Narcisse Noire, and one of the most intensely powerful molecules in all of perfume.

It smells a bit like if jungle vines, new leather, and road tar had had some kind of demented, mutant lovechild. It's so impossibly powerful that I spilled some in my lab once and the whole place smelled like it for three months.

Three. Months.

In dilution, it's extremely versatile. It can be made to smell mossy, leathery, vetiver-y, tobacco-y, or just extremely green. It works beautifully in combination with violet leaf absolute (which basically smells like the color green would smell like if it were made into a concentrated liquid), or with extremely pungent materials like seaweed absolute (which reeks of iodine). Isobutyl quinoline is the cornerstone of nearly every modern leather fragrance (and most of the older ones too), but it's rare to smell it in any recognizable form; its intense power and tendency to get stronger with maturity usually confines its usage to below 1% of the fragrance formula. This same quality makes it excellent for use in soap fragrances, as seen in our use of a re-created version of Mousse de Saxe in Lavanille and the upcoming Beaudelaire. It's really neat stuff, but not a substance to be taken lightly. If you'd like to smell the Pyralone version, which is made by fragrance manufacturer/perfume conglomerate Givaudan, you can pick some up from Perfumer Supply House, but, please, be darn careful with it.